How readers navigate comic book pages: evidence from eye movements

While a z-path is intrinsically part of how typically formatted text is read, it is less clear that this same approach is used when reading comics. Previous evidence for the z-path is limited to self-reported preferences from readers. The main aim of this paper was to objectively confirm that readers do use a z-path when navigating a comic book page by using eye-tracking technology. We examined the eye-movement behaviour of 90 participants when reading a textless page from the comic Watchmen. Participants were a mix of novice and expert comic book readers. Results indicated that the z-path was an accurate prototypical descriptor of how participants navigated the comic book pages, but that there was a great deal of variation from that prototype. In particular, it was shown that readers commonly demonstrated regressive saccades, where fixations moved back to the previous panel rather than to the next panel in the z-path order. These findings provide a strong first foundation for future work in this area that looks at reading behaviour in comic book pages.